


own me

by fawnlike (amainiris)



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: M/M, Mind Games, Power Dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-09
Updated: 2020-07-09
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:09:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25161403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amainiris/pseuds/fawnlike
Summary: They build their camaraderie slowly. It’s not easy, but it’s not exactly difficult, either. They fall into a rhythm as if they’ve been doing this their entire lives, and sometimes Will wonders if, in some other world, they have. Hannibal tells him that the flaw in desiring anything is that it makes them vulnerable, and Will might be imagining it, how the other man looks at him when he says it. Or he might not be.He doesn’t name it love because he has so little to compare it with. He doesn’t name it love because he wouldn’t recognize love if it knocked on his door, covered in someone else’s blood, wearing someone else’s clothes, cradling someone else’s knife.
Relationships: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 6
Kudos: 43





	own me

**Author's Note:**

> Hannibal corrupting Will pt. 848397340

The past does not stay where it belongs. The past comes back in shudders and starts, in phantom limbs and ghost memories and night terrors, in tension wound up the spine and through the tendons. The past lives in darkness, in the helplessness of bad dreams, in the buzzsaw air of autumn and the lurid dusk of a too-warm summer.

The past is not a shadow, bound to you only in the light. The past is silent, ever-conscious, poised to pounce like some great cat already unfurled. The past is an anchor.

“Will,” Hannibal says, shortly after they meet, and just before the whole of Will’s existence becomes marred by— _this,_ “Are you familiar with the saying that it’s possible to get anything you want if only you pay the price?”

It’s very much like him, Will thinks even then. It’s so like the other man to concentrate on what one _takes._

“I'm not familiar,” he says simply.

That night he looks up at the sky, lacerated with stars, and feels nothing. He walks into his house, pours two fingers of whiskey and paces restlessly, fearing not the nightmares but the gasp into awareness afterwards, the sheets soaked with his sweat, the pillows sometimes with his tears. He sits with the dogs and drinks until night slips into morning, dawn spreads her pale fingers over the world, and Hannibal is at his door again.

As if he’d never left, or never would.

  
  
  
  


*

  
  
  


They build their camaraderie slowly. It’s not easy, but it’s not exactly difficult, either. They fall into rhythm as if they’ve been doing this their entire lives, and sometimes Will wonders if, in some other world, they have. Hannibal tells him that the flaw in desiring anything is that it makes them vulnerable, and Will might be imagining it, how the other man looks at him when he says it. Or he might not be.

He doesn’t want to think about it, not really. Everything concerning Hannibal gets messed-up and confused in his head when he contemplates it for too long, like one of those optical illusions; nothing is ever quite right. It’s all a little off, a little skewed, and distantly he has the impression of falling from a great height, into utter freefall.

He doesn’t name it love because he has so little to compare it with. He doesn’t name it love because he wouldn’t recognize love if it knocked on his door, covered in someone else’s blood, wearing someone else’s clothes, cradling someone else’s knife.

  
  
  


*

  
  
  


“We are her fathers now,” Hannibal tells him as they watch over Abigail Hobbs—dark-haired, restless, slight, eyes bluer than the heart of the sky. At this something traitorous and sweet blooms in Will’s chest, not merely at the words themselves but at the implication they carry. The desire to carve out a home, a family, in this blunt-edged broken world—sometimes it almost takes his breath away, the things one can live without.

And Hannibal knows this. For one with so much, he is startlingly abstemious; it’s Will who drinks too much, Will who lives at the fringes of existence, Will who watches the long nights wane into morning alone. Will who tries to be gentle with Abigail, to be receptive to Alana’s overtures of kindness. Will who remains solitary, who wears his loneliness as a shield.

He wants to ask Hannibal if he meant it, what he said about Abigail. About them.

He doesn’t have the courage.

  
  
  


*

  
  
  


“I feel,” he says finally, “As if you’re watching me. Waiting for me to do something.”

“I’m your psychiatrist, Will.”

“That’s not all you are.” A rupture of frustration makes the words serrated, sharp enough to cut.

“That’s not all I am?” Hannibal leans forward in his chair. They’re in his office, the evening light is honeyed through the windows, and Will feels as if he's at the edge of some terrible revelation.

He closes his eyes briefly, opens them again. Hannibal is still waiting, ever patient, for him to continue. Will’s headaches are going to drive him to madness if he isn’t already there, and the sight of Hannibal seated across from him, unbothered, temperate, incenses him more than it should. He wants to strike the other man in that instant. He almost does.

“That’s not all you are,” Will repeats, and the way they must do this—forever skip around what they want to say, treat whatever is between them like some Godforsaken psych experiment—is wearing him thin, threadbare. He is utterly exhausted, by both this and by Hannibal. “Don’t make me spell this out.”

The light changes abruptly—or something in Hannibal’s eyes does.

“I feel as if you’re playing a game with me,” Will continues, because now that he’s started he simply can’t stop. “You’re playing a game and only you know the rules. It’s not—” He cuts himself off, because the word _fair_ seems so unforgivably childish, so weak.

He doesn’t want to strike him, Will realizes. He wants to do something else entirely.

And Hannibal sits there quietly, holding Will gently in his eyes, and says nothing at all.

  
  
  


*

  
  
  


He wants to pull the air from Hannibal’s lungs like a gasp. 

  
  
  
  


*

  
  
  


“You can take anything,” Hannibal tells him once more, so softly, “As long as you are willing to pay the price.”

His office, again. Tuesday afternoon, the light blurry and half-focused, the wind cruel even for autumn. Hannibal is elegant, almost leonine as he surveys Will from his chair; Will is miserable contemplating the distance between them. He takes off his glasses for lack of anything else to do, rubs the lenses on the edge of his shirt. When he puts them back on, Hannibal is waiting for him to say something. Yet when Will responds, he’s fairly certain that for the first time he surprises them both.

“And you?” he asks finally, before he can stop himself. “What is _your_ price, Dr. Lecter?”

Hannibal looks as if he’s about to smile. “I feel as if we’re expanding beyond the realm of psychiatry now, Will. Your session is almost up.”

“No,” Will says, quite simply.

“No?” Hannibal poses it like a question, but Will knows it’s a challenge.

“I’m not leaving. Not like this.”

Hannibal leans forward in the chair, looking at Will as if he’s considering him honestly for the first time. For long moments, neither of them move at all.

And then Hannibal stands and walks to open the office door, gesturing politely, wordlessly, for Will to leave. He dips his blond head and Will sees the gleam of light on it, the interplay of shadow on his darkened features. Something rises in Will that feels almost like hatred, and at once he gets up and shuts the door with one forceful push, turns to Hannibal with the same cold patience on his expression that the doctor himself has worn countless times before.

“Tell me,” he says carefully, enunciating every word, “Your price.”

This time Hannibal does smile.

  
  


*

  
  
  


He isn’t sure if Hannibal fell into his trap or if he fell into Hannibal’s, and it’s not worth agonizing over. He doesn’t even know if he feels closer to the other man in the act of sex or the act of murder, and sooner or later the lines shift, blur worryingly before his eyes. He could pretend that he wants to look away, into the light-filled brightness of the outer world; but he doesn’t. Instead Will peels the bloody clothes away from them both, kisses the other man almost as an act of contrition, and thinks to himself that if it isn’t love—at least it feels good, in the moment. If it's not love, at least it's unlike whatever came before.

  
  



End file.
